From the Files of Mrs. Q: Teacher Eats School Lunch, Blogs Results

Teacher blogs her year of eating school lunch, when she can stomach it.

ByABC News via logo
March 18, 2010, 10:14 AM

March 19, 2010— -- Call her the 007 of school lunches, the Sherlock Holmes of the school cafeteria.

Or just call her Mrs. Q. That's the moniker chosen by the anonymous teacher who has vowed to eat school lunches for a year and blog the results in hopes of inspiring change at her school and others around the country.

"Let's feed all kids well," she told ABCNews.com. "Who can argue with that?"

Her blog, Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project, has been catching fire in recent weeks as she chokes down the bad stuff -- lasagna and bitter-tasting mystery veggies -- and surprises herself by enjoying meals like chili and mac and cheese.

Though she's hardly the first to complain about meals from a school cafeteria, her blog has been catching the eye of student health advocates as well as detractors, one of whom called her a "vegetarian hippie."

"They're attacking my character or they're saying this country's going down the tubes and we should be grateful for what we've got," she said.

But most shower her with praise for volunteernig to eat the only options many of her students have. Her number of followers has exploded from a few hundred earlier this week to nearly 3,000 today.

Mrs. Q said she wishes she could take credit for a moment of grand inspiration that prompted her to start a school food revolution, but in reality, her blog was born after just a couple of unfortunate experiences with school meals.

"There were times I was forced to have a school lunch because I forgot my lunch," she said. "And I just remember thinking this is terrible, I can't believe this."

"A lot of the other teachers ignore it," she said.

And many of the students and parents, she said, simply don't know any better.

"A lot of these kids I work with are poor, so they aren't packed lunches," she said.

Mrs. Q called some of the menu items "deceptive," such as boasting meatloaf, which it was actually a dull-brown meat patty.

The meatloaf entry on March 3 also contained Mrs. Q's disappointment with mystery greens that could have been spinach, could have been collard greens. She posted a picture and asked her readers to help her identify what she ate.